credentials as a witness and testimony
that He is yet to do something that
is extraordinary and beyond human
understanding: He is going to redeem
unrepentant Israel. (‘Redeeming
Israel’ is also related to God’s promises
in the New Testament in Romans 11.)

When Zechariah penned his words
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
he could have had no understanding
(unless God revealed it to him
supernaturally) of the incredible
vastness of space, of hundreds of
billions of galaxies, or of the speed
of light. But God Himself, speaking
though the prophet, uses this example
of stretching the heavens to show
His power and authority. The other
two events—laying the foundation
of the Earth and forming the spirit
of man within him—were things
that Zechariah would have understood. But ‘stretching the
heavens’? As a prophet, he was only repeating what the
Lord had told him. God used Zechariah as His mouthpiece
to give “The word of the Lord concerning Israel.” And that
word had to do with the ‘last days’ and what God is yet
going to do when all nations of the earth are gathered against
Jerusalem (12: 3). God will deliver the people of Israel, and
then they shall look on Him whom “they have pierced” (the
Messiah) (12: 10).

The ‘stretching of the heavens’ in Zechariah thus stands as
a testimony against the world by the living God. In Isaiah 51,
the Lord rebukes the children of Israel, saying, you “have
forgotten the Lord your Maker, [the One] who stretched
forth the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth ...”
(Isaiah 51: 13). These scriptures are primarily about the Jewish
people. They are intended both as a witness for salvation to
those who will believe and a witness against those who will
not, both in the prophets’ days and in our own.

Many of the best-known cosmologists today are self-proclaimed atheists of Jewish background. They accept
cosmological expansion as a given, based on big bang
cosmology, including alleged inflation of the universe,
and related factors. As a creationist, I reject those
presuppositions, as well as attempts to derive an age of the
universe based on them. At the same time, believing that
these passages might refer to present-day expansion of the
universe does not thereby obligate me to accept the whole
rotten edifice of big bang cosmology. Can these two things
be divorced from each other? That is the question.

The biblical passages about the ‘stretching of theheavens’ are stark statements made centuries ago by theHebrew prophets—perhaps, in part,as a witness to our own unbelievinggeneration. To me, this is really morean apologetical or missiologicalquestion at this point in time ratherthan primarily an academic orscientific one. We are in a struggle formen’s souls. If pointing to the possibleexpansion of the heavens can challengenon-believers to look into Scriptureand God’s promises, I believe that wehave a wonderful opportunity hereto use this as part of our witness.Meanwhile, I am also concerned thatwe, as the creationist community, donot, as the saying goes, ‘cut off ournose to spite our face’ by unnecessarilydismissing one possible interpretationof Scripture at a moment in time whenit can give us great advantage.

‘That their cosmology may be used against them’

I have always deeply appreciated Dr Henry Morris’s
book, That Their Words May Be Used Against Them and
the spirit behind it regarding evolutionists’ quotes and
worldview.
19 (this year is also the twentieth anniversary
of its publication in 1997). We can certainly use similar
approaches in our apologetics when it comes to aspects of
big bang cosmology without embracing the big bang itself,
in the spirit that ‘Their Cosmology May Be Used Against
Them’ (figure 2). What does modern-day cosmology claim?

Three of the most important indicators that appear
to support cosmological expansion include: redshift
measurements of distant galaxies according to Hubble’s
Law; the predictions of general relativity; and, based on
supernovae data, the change in the rate of expansion derived
from measurements of the purported cosmological constant.
Hartnett has examined these and related factors in depth and
their pros and cons with respect to expansion in two key
articles that appeared in this journal in 2011.20

Redshift and Hubble’s Law

As readily admitted by a leading cosmologist, while
Hubble’s Law may be “almost exactly true nearby, [it is] …
not necessarily true over a large fraction of the observable
universe”.
21 Beyond that, Hartnett has recently shown that
‘the greater the redshift, the greater the distance rule’
upon which big bang cosmology and the Standard Model
of expansion are based may not hold for quasars and active
galactic nuclei (AGNs).
22 Thus, while redshift measurements
mayindicate an expanding universe (and most cosmologists

Figure 2.
Cover of Dr Henry M. Morris’s 1997
book, That Their Words May Be Used Against
Them